This is not a rhetorical question. It is clear that Catholics leadership on this issue can result is a good stance and opinion for the nation, on either side. Peace through Strength is what Ronald Reagan would say.

The article says: "Catholics can call out members of their flock for supporting capital punishment, where the state actually puts people to death, without falling into fallacy"

It should be noted that Catholic doctrine is also not fundamentally against capital punishment when applied justly. However, Catholic bishops in the USA take the position that capital punishment is not justified in the USA today.

Based on my limited understanding of Catholic doctrine, there is indeed room for gun rights. But I honestly do not know how nearly-unlimited gun rights, as advocated by the NRA, can be consonant with religious values. Religion, at heart, is all about self-regulation of our needs, desires, and passions and putting the good of the community above individual rights.

Rights themselves are a secular construct. Religion deals mostly with responsibilities (to God, to others) and very rarely in rights. This is not to say that gun owners do not have Constitutional rights. I believe they do. The Supreme Court has ruled that they do. But Constitutional rights are not really at issue in a religious debate.

The debate in America is not between people who want more restrictions and people who want fewer. It is between people who want any restrictions at all and people who want an unregulated market in which any gun is freely available to any citizen. The latter stance, the stance of the NRA, sees individual rights as far more important than public safety.

It is simply not correct that "No one in the NRA camp argues that the right to bear arms is so sweeping and so sacred that the cost of a few dozen or a few thousand lives is the unfortunate price of liberty." This is exactly what the NRA and many gun owners do argue. You can tell that this is their position by reading their online comments and their own discussion boards.

Their reaction after Newtown was not "I cannot believe that the child of a law-abiding gun owner is responsible for this tragedy. What should we, as gun owners, do to ensure that our weapons never threaten the lives of schoolchildren again?" Not at all. Their reaction was "If you ban this or regulate that, eventually you will have no protection from tyranny."

In other words, Newton is exactly the price we all need to pay for "freedom".

In this debate, the debate we having with people who believe that guns are a moral good and that any regulation of them is a moral evil, I do not see how any religious leader can possibly be on the side of the NRA.

Religious people should always choose the lives of schoolchildren and more broadly, public safety, over the rights of any individual, including gun owners. These Catholic leaders are absolutely right to remind their fellow Catholics of the core values that should guide their work in a country that has lost sight of the true intentions of its Founders.

It should be noted that even the right to free speech isn't unlimited. We set boundaries on some forms of speech on the grounds that it is expressly harmful to recognisable groups. We do not suggest, for example, that free speech is consequence-free speech. We do not condone malicious libel or defamation with intent.

So if the first amendment is allowed to be fettered (with just cause) - why is the second immune?

In fact, let's jump right to the Declaration of Independence which claims that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Yet no one seems to be willing to argue that capital punishment is a primary violation of the right to life. Instead, it's argued that criminals have lost their rights (which kind of argues against 'unalienable', doesn't it?)

In fact, right as practiced is always a delicate balancing act between the status of the individual and that of the state.

"(N)o one in the NRA camp argues that the right to bear arms is so sweeping and so sacred that the cost of a few dozen or a few thousand lives is the unfortunate price of liberty." But that's exactly what they are implying, isn't it? Or do we have to wait for a press release?

It is plainly evident that the ready availability of firearms leads to increased shootings. As a teenager I loved shooting as a sport but as an adult I see carnage especially in the U.S. It just makes it too easy for those who would take the law into their own hands or suffer from a mental state which puts innocent lives at risk. I am sure that those who speak of "a God given right to bear arms" would not themselves live by any sincere religious belief based on love. It would probably take the gun murder of somebody close to them to get them to rethink the matter. Peter Pollard ppollard5@bigpond.com Rothwell, Qld.,Australia

"The guns debate is thus fundamentally different from disputes over the permissible range of freedom of speech, where ugly, offensive, ludicrous expression is seen as the cost we must bear to preserve a foundational freedom."

I read this sentence again and it's almost childish. The author equates the freedom of speech to be freedom itself, as if the very defintion of freedom were of nothing more than speech. If that were all there were to it, the Bill of Rights would be but one ammendment. From basic human life experiences, it should exist for the person writing the article who should have enough experiences in life to know, freedom is more than being able to bitch and moan about one's circumstances in life.

Hmmmmmmmm.
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I think there may be some validity in those reports that reading comprehension may be on the decline in the US.
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Mr/Ms McGenius, you have given us a lot to think about. Thank you.
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Regards.

I'm under the impression that most of these writers weren't educated by Jesuits.
The starting point of Catholic morality (and how it's often different from Protestant morality) is the inevitability of failing to live up to the standards of Jesus. The basic assumption is that all people desire to do good, but ultimately fail to understand the consequences of their actions, or perhaps in a larger sense, what good is.
Which is why Catholic morality is so heavily based in original principals, even to the point of idiocy. The ideal Catholic doesn't just not kill people, but they would avoid any action that could lead to harming another person, and when they inevitably fail to do that they must ask for forgiveness and make it right.
America is quite clearly harming people with it's gun laws, and the response from the Catholic theologians is perfectly consistant with Catholic morality. They are attempting to address human failures, not human intentions. Whether we think Catholic morality is a plausible way to run a country is another matter.

You are correct that the theologians' position is consistent with Catholic morality, but S.M.'s point is that they incorrectly conclude that more gun control is required by Catholic Moral Teaching. On that point I think he is entirely correct.

Actually, Catholic morality does permit the harming of others. Self-defense is a moral defense, as is the defense of others. I'm not sure where you get the notion that Catholics must avoid all action that might harm others, because that does not jive at all with my Catholic educational experience.

"All this rhetoric to one side, no one in the NRA camp argues that the right to bear arms is so sweeping and so sacred that the cost of a few dozen or a few thousand lives is the unfortunate price of liberty. The guns debate is thus fundamentally different from disputes over the permissible range of freedom of speech, where ugly, offensive, ludicrous expression is seen as the cost we must bear to preserve a foundational freedom."

So you're free to foment a mob but not free to protect yourself from one? Good to hear the logic. When push comes to shove, The Economist stands with the mob, and especially, the speaker that fires it up.

To the argument, below, that Israel arms everyone, including teachers: the critical difference between Israel's situation and that of the US is that Israel feels it is being threatened by invasion from people who will destroy their state. Would they choose to be so heavily armed if the threat came only from fellow citizens? For them to do so would mean there was something terribly wrong with Israeli citizens. That so many Americans should feel so threatened by their fellows citizens AND government implies that there is something terribly wrong with American citizens - or that the citizens who feel threatened no longer want any part of the noble experiment. This would explain all the effort that has gone into re-creating the Founding Fathers in the image of the current GOP fringe, and the big push to do away with the separation of church and state. This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. A flag pin on a lapel, and a bible, does not a patriot make. Quite the opposite - a true patriot has no need for identifying marks, his actions bear witness to his understanding of the Founder's intent.

"Catholic politicians who oppose the assault weapons ban put forward by Dianne Feinstein and similar measures do not believe their position will cost American lives. They contend, rightly or wrongly, that these regulations will have no effect on the level of gun violence."
It's beyond question that these regulations will have no effect on the level of gun violence. Rifles of any sort are used in only about 300 murders per year in America-- about 4%-- and so-called assault weapons are a subset of rifles, used in under 1% of those murders if Feinstein's own numbers are used. Large-capacity magazines are similar; even if Mother Jones were completely correct (i.e., not had their study's methodology discredited by serious scholars, which is what has happened) that there have been 25 "mass killings" (4 or more people at a time) since 2006 (not per year; 25 total), that's still a ridiculously small percentage. How many of this type of murders will simply take place using a different weapon if these regulations are passed? A high percentage, I firmly believe.
Gun regulations have no measurable effect on intentional homicide in any country that has passed them; would-be murderers have simply turned to different weapons. In the U.K., for example, knives are something like 35% of murders-- about three times their American popularity. Unless we're going to claim that it's less tragic to get killed with a knife than it is with a gun, it seems clear to me that the real low-hanging fruit of murder-reduction is cultural-- and perhaps environmental, if the lead-in-gasoline theory is correct.

So would I be correct in assuming that you're arguing for no regulations whatsoever
"Gun regulations have no measurable effect on intentional homicide in any country that has passed them." That's a bit to the right of the NRA.
Am I correct in assuming you're suggesting, instead, "cultural" changes. And how, exactly, would they be brought about without infringing on other basic rights, like the First? And do you really want to hang your argument on the "lead-in- gasoline theory"?

No, I'm arguing for real discussion on real terms, not rationalized emotions, and regulations that actually make a speck of sense. Universal background checks make sense to me. Cracking down on straw purchasers makes sense to me. Political grandstanding and milking a tragedy for political profit while actually accomplishing next to nothing by dwelling on high-capacity magazines or scary-looking weapons just disgusts me.

"'Gun regulations have no measurable effect on intentional homicide in any country that has passed them.' That's a bit to the right of the NRA."

In no way. It's rational, fact-based and intellectually independent-- something which is characteristic of neither the NRA nor most of the Left. Examine this:

and take a look at the intentional homicide rate in countries that have passed major gun laws, in the years before and after they were passed. The argument will probably be made that these statistics are wrong. It's possible. There are many bad statistics out there and Wikipedia is often mocked as a serious source. But these numbers are sourced. So someone should test whether they're right or not. And if they are, let's acknowledge that gun laws by and large only make would-be murderers use other methods. No one wants that to be true. But I can't alter my views based on other people's emotions.

The lead-in-gasoline theory (which I merely mentioned without endorsing it) is not some crackpot fringe notion espoused by people in tinfoil hats. Its best-known appearance has been in Freakonomics, but it has also made appearances in places like NPR, the Democratic Underground and Mother Jones, such as here:

As for cultural changes, I honestly don't know what form they'd take, how they'd be put in place or what compromises would have to be struck. But since black street culture has black people murdering each other at four or five times everyone else's rate, such that if they didn't it would cut America's murder rate by one-third, I'd say finding the real roots of violent culture ought to be the Holy Grail of anti-violence. At the very minimum that ought to be a huge part of the discussion.

I wrote:"'Gun regulations have no measurable effect on intentional homicide in any country that has passed them.' That's a bit to the right of the NRA."
You replied: "In no way. It's rational, fact-based and intellectually independent-- something which is characteristic of neither the NRA nor most of the Left."
I have an idea. We could remove all gun regulations ("gun regulations [not just some gun regulations? ] have NO measurable effects etc. etc.") and see if you're correct. Of course, that might be difficult, since you've already said you want "regulations that make a speck of sense."
You might approve of universal background checks and cracking down on straw purchasers, but why? They'll have "no measurable effect". Correct? So why bother searching for regs that "make a speck of sense. You jumped on that "gun regulations have no measurable effects" bandwagon and I'm not sure you have anywhere else to go. . .
And then you mentioned the lead-in-gasoline theory without endorsing it and admitted you don't know what form cultural changes would take, all the while reinforcing the idea that no regulations work. While we're waiting for ideas, what will we do?

Specifically if you are looking at the UK in those numbers you may have noticed there was an increase in murder rates of +15.3% between 1997 and 1998. Not coincidentally the handgun ban was passed in 1997 meaning gun control actually lead to 15% more murders and an elevated rate thereafter only dropping below that rate in 2009 nearly 12 years later! That is the smoking gun (no pun intended) checkmate you lefty statist marxist Alinsky readers, gun control kills people!

If you want a reasonable, rational conversation, don't be a wise-ass who latches onto the surface meanings of things and expands them to ridiculous conclusions. That's exactly the kind of emotion with a veneer of rationality that I was talking about before. I meant that gun regulations of the kind that I mentioned, that forbid or restrict gun ownership by type (like the "assault weapon" ban or based on magazine capacity), have not had their intended result of making homicides go down by any significant amount.

Now, unless you plan to settle down and discuss things rationally, I'll go talk with someone else here who does.

I'm not as concerned about what you meant as I am about what you wrote. A rational discussion on a blog requires writing what you mean.
If you want to share your ideas with a mind-reader, look elsewhere.

Whoa did Ted Nugent just take over my account? If I actually believed that reasoning I would not be employed in my current analyst role at a financial firm. Notice Scotland and Northern Ireland magically discontinue reporting after 1997. Then notice for the 2000's it is reported under UK instead of England/Wales. I can deduce given the higher rates of murder in Scotland and NI that 98 and 99 include all 4 and this is what we continue to see in the aggregate UK numbers through out the 2000's. Even if the data were perfect causality would be difficult and any link between them would be tenuous at best. The best thing to look at is rate of Gun Homicide. So make your argument with out statistics. I need a potential reason that more guns would lead to less homicides other than deterrence. Go.

I did notice that, but I figured conclusions based on giving the other side the benefit of the doubt would be more convincing. So I decided to attribute that to other things, not the absence of handguns.

There's a real case to be made against stupid gun laws, and it ought to be made calmly and factually. Blithering and raving only helps your enemies by making people assume that you have no better argument.

What I meant is well within the range of meanings of what I wrote. If you weren't sure how to interpret it, you could have asked. And if you're going to insist on everyone being painfully specific all the time about what they mean, you're going to be constantly disappointed by the world.

"How many of this type of murders will simply take place using a different weapon if these regulations are passed? A high percentage, I firmly believe."
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Based on which notion? Passing a ban is not the same as eliminating the target of the ban (see drug war fiasco), or do you object based on the notion that other means would be resorted to?
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The cases of nations with bans are made. What makes them irrelevant?
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Unfortunately a more rigorous comparison in countries with bans, in this case Australia, would be to compare the number killed in murders v the intent to mass murder before and after the ban is in place. It's unlikely that such information could be collected.
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What still gets to me is at least a couple cases we've had involved individuals who were widely known as off their rocker. Supposedly the guy who commited the Amityville murders was voted most likely to be an axe murder, Virginia Tech, and Anza (maybe).
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With regard to tragedy of death by gun v knife, I rather think the argument revolves around the notion that guns make killing easy, and an attack by knife is statistically less likely to result in death.

"Based on which notion? Passing a ban is not the same as eliminating the target of the ban (see drug war fiasco), or do you object based on the notion that other means would be resorted to?"

I have no idea what you mean by that.

"The cases of nations with bans are made. What makes them irrelevant?"

The bans are irrelevant because the evidence I mentioned, if correct, suggests that nations have a pretty consistent internal murder rate that doesn't go down after laws restricting guns are passed. Clearly, something else is at work.

"Unfortunately a more rigorous comparison in countries with bans, in this case Australia, would be to compare the number killed in murders v the intent to mass murder before and after the ban is in place. It's unlikely that such information could be collected."

I agree, but mass murders are, as I pointed out above, a minuscule percentage of murders. To argue that they should be disproportionately more important than any other equal number of murders is to say that it's our shock and not the murder itself that's important.

"With regard to tragedy of death by gun v knife, I rather think the argument revolves around the notion that guns make killing easy, and an attack by knife is statistically less likely to result in death."

And yet the British homicide rate by knife is three times America's, and their homicide rate by any method, far from going down after the '97 gun ban, went _up_, as that other guy pointed out, which suggests that the intent to kill and persistence in doing so can't be much affected by controlling the method.

I am curious if anyone can explain the extent, if any, to which the Catholic Church has articulated that liberal democracy is preferred, on a theological basis or otherwise, to other forms of government. I (as a Catholic) am not surprised to see the Church end up on this side of this issue, because the Church does not strike me as according high value to the principles of limited, controlled government that underlie some of the most important arguments against gun control. Rather, historically and as a modern institution, the Church seems to lean toward central planning, acting itself as an unrestrained government to the extent that it is able.

The Church doesn't have a theological preference for any specific form of government. Vatican City is run as an elected monarchy.
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Limited government is implied in the doctrine of subsidiarity. A higher order should not supplant a competent lower order. So the government shouldn't do what the individual can do for himself. That's pretty libertarian but it's balanced by the doctrine of solidarity. We're all members of the human family which means supporting the needy members but also being paternalistic at times.
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To oversimplify, the Church supports whatever moral means to produce more productive persons.

Mmm, historically, when the church had political power, supported its glorification. Current circumstance has them playing their hand differently, but to the heirarchy its mearly a tactical adjustment.

One of the popes declared the United States and Republicanism immoral because they preferred the divine right of kings and popes. Recent popes have believed that it is more important to preserve the appearance of the Church than to curb priestly immorality.

Banning assault weapons will not stop criminals killing innocent people. Assault Weapons Bands (AWB) is chipping away the Second Amendment Rights and eventually it will not exist. This is what people like Obama wants. If one day the Obama government decided to go genocidal there is nothing you can do to stop it. For an example Hitler in Germany there were millions of Jews people died, and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia they collected guns from citizen’s then later murder their own people. People are missing the points that weapons don’t pull its triggers, it the psycho killer kill people do. Taking guns away from the good guys will only makes the bad guys kills more people easily. The cops will not always be there in time when you needed them. That’s why good citizen should have the right to bears arms to protect themselves against criminals and genocidal government.

I have a lot of sympathy with these theologians. They are trying to do whatever they can to preserve life (which would be achieved through severe gun restrictions).

Their arguments may be pushing it a bit (as you noted), but their hearts are in the right place and their goals are still admirable. If this letter can move the hearts of some Republican congressman then it will have achieved something.

It is a real shame that the NRA crowd cant see the wood through the trees. They are often genuine people who sincerely believe what they believe with the problem that they are unwilling to change sincerely held views in the light of evidence and common sense.

Thd problem with this line of reasoning is simple: there is in fact no evidence to suopprt gun control laws.
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I suppose it is a good thing that "gun control" supporters have at long last learned the concept of evidence-bassd policy, but all the same, simply claiming the existence of evidence doesn't make it true.

There is plenty of evidence to support gun control laws, if you bothered to look outside the United States. My home state of Western Australia has 2.4 million people, very strict gun control of rifles, a total ban on automatic weapons, and access to pistols only for the police and security personnel. The state has one or two gun homicides per year and far fewer murders of any description than a similar US state. The same is true of all the other Australian states.

Have you looked at the data from Australia, where gun control has become steadily stricter since 1989? Since that date, firearm homicides and suicides have both declined very considerably. Coincidences??

And this talk of assault guns is misses 99% of the point. Which is most gun deaths are suicides, but most of the gun crime, 70%++ is committed with guns bought to commit crimes. One gun a month laws work, and work by making it more difficult and expensive for guns to be obtained by straw buyers. Making the background check system better would also obviously help. Starting now, requiring people to take a 2-3 day weapons education course to buy a gun would also help in a number of ways. Almost all states require them to shoot animals, why not to own the gun? They would act as a screening process for the dangerously crazy. There are something like 1000 accidental deaths, and 15,000 woundings, that are recorded anyway, per year. I know a guy who has a concealed carry permit, who when I posted about an animal loose in a new bedroom I was building out upstairs, suggested bird shot in a shotgun. No amount of damage an animal could do could possibly equal the effect of a 12 gauge fired inside a house, it's batshit, and the guy has the right to carry a gun in public.

Some kind of registered transfer system would also help with the straw buyer problem. The guns in your name, you are in trouble if it is used in a crime, whether you did it or not.

S.M. | NEW YORK wrote "If they’re sincere in this belief — and not fooling themselves about the social cost of semi-automatic weapons — the anti-regulation position is in no sense a breach of Catholic teachings."
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I don't read The Economist blog postings to learn about Catholic (Doctrine) teachings or how to brew Lapsang Souchong black tea (should someone be planning such a posting).
:-) :-)

The scientific truth about gun control is, we do not know as much as we should know about what works versus what does not work. Partly this lack of empirical knowledge is because such policy questions are inherently more challenging to test than a question like "which pill works better for a particular disease?"

However, a major stumbling block preventing high-quality evidence-based gun policy recommendations is that the US gun lobby has worked very hard to reduce funding for relevant academic research, much as the tobacco lobby once did. If the gun lobby truly does not fear the truth, why do they work so hard to prevent independent researchers from seeking it?

While you are correct that correlation statistics do not provide evidence of causation, the fact that most advanced countries with fewer guns per capita have less gun violence per capita is fairly compelling. In order to change the gun culture, similar to changing the smoking culture, America must get out of its parochialism and look globally at what the gun ownership debates have lead to in other countries and what has worked and what hasn't. That America is so far beyond other countries in guns per capita, strength of the gun lobby and views on guaranteed rights of gun ownership should not prevent a rational debate from beginning. The Catholic church has done much to move that forward.

Nobody on the pro-freedom side of this argument is against rational debate - on the contrary. I do feel impelled to point out that anti-freedom campaigners although anti-freedom campaigners routinely cite international comparisons in support of their case, it's always been fairly easy to show such arguments to be fallacious.

I agree that the assault gun ban would be pretty useless. I think we should require them to be painted pink and decorated with hello kitty stickers and to have a delicate yellow rose in place of the flash suppressor. There is a reason why some people hate them and some people love them, and shooters tend to use them when they have access to them -- it is that bad-man snake-eyed thing. Has a bad effect on the heads of some folks. You see this too with the militia people: turn up in a militia camp with an old-style mini-14 and you might as well be wearing a dress, even though the function and the round is the same. Painting them pink would reduce the effect, without infringing on anybody's right to be turned into a colander by seal team 6.